FORCE: Alpha Badboy MMA Romance (7 page)

“God. I—” She looked lost.

If she only knew what that kind of look did to him. His heart felt like an incendiary buried under the sand, just waiting for the misstep of some unfortunate soul.

Cameron’s mind went where it always did, thinking of her tongue, warm and wet, working down his body. He had imaged how it would feel a million times. What would it feel like when she explored him, moving lower, the intense pleasure of her tongue as he touched his engorged head.

Jesus man, get a damn grip before you pass the fuck out. You’ve got a long way to go before you get a leg over this mare.

A single ray of sun broke through the ever present gray of late fall. Winter was coming, but an Indian summer reprieve filled the air with temperate breezes and the scent of leaves giving in and falling to the ground.

The silver lines of sunlight fell across her face, creeping down the alley and desperately trying to light the darkest of corners.

“Sssshhh, just tell me one thing.” Cameron drew her tighter, feeling her stiffen but keeping her face turned upward. “It’s real, Vic. You. Me. It’s been rumbling around us for years. Just tell me you feel it. Tell the truth, it’s me. No one else. Look at me and tell me.”

Her eyes flickered, the stiffness in her body softened, he felt the vibration and heat that came off of her and fed the fire deep inside.

He couldn’t control it, her body never before so close, so full and complete against him. The heat coming off of her was intoxicating; he watched her eyes as they fought the truth, desperate to find the words that would make it okay.

“Cam, it’s wrong. We’re not right for each other — and we’re family.”

“Fuck that family shit. That’s just a facade, a bullshit wall. Answer the question.” His voice drew tight, his fingers hardening against the silken skin of her neck.

“It doesn’t matter.” The light in her eyes turned darker; he was losing her.

“It does fucking matter!” He pushed his lips back down, taking her harder — violently, trying to bring her to the truth by showing her the fire that exploded whenever they touched.

She kissed back as Cameron’s tongue and lips took control like a commander over his battalion. He would not let her lie; not let her deny. She needed to be pushed, to let go of her questions, the control, the shame.

He jerked them apart, his eyes narrow and full of fight.

“Answer me. It’s there — it’s us. Just say you feel it, Vic.”

“So what!? What if I do?” She was done, pushing against the wall of rock that was his chest and she twisted her head and wrenched from his hold. “Some things are wrong Cameron! I realize you have never actually gotten a grip on that little fact — the civilized world apparently is not where you live — but it doesn’t make it not so. It’s wrong. Yes,
whatever!
Sure, there’s something here—” Her hands waved back and forth in the inches she had pushed between them. “—we’re
family
Cameron. It’s
wrong
.”

Her voice caught in her throat; she turned her head like she was looking for someone down at the dead end of the garbage strewn alley.

“It’s not wrong. No fucking way
this
is wrong.”

Listening to that shit burned a hole in his ears.

Her fight only renewed his hunger. He felt it like something untamed and without rules and boundaries. Circumstances made them family, not blood and it had been a long time ago. If anyone cared, he didn’t and neither should she.

She didn’t try to leave, Cameron knew the door was still open, if only a slice and he rammed into it like a bulldozer. The muscles and tendons down his back drew as tight as a bow string.

“I don’t give a fuck what anyone else thinks, Vic. I’m here, now. It’s time. We’re going to give this a fucking shot or—” Cameron felt his own voice falter — then crack — something he had not heard since he said ‘Goodbye’ to the beautiful creature that brought him into this world. “—I’m here. I was fucking born for you, Vic. I feel it, like I feel my own heart beating, my blood flowing when I look at you. I know we are meant to be together, no fucking question. Haven’t I always been there for you? Taken care of you? Protected you when no one else gave a shit? How do you think I always seem to be there when you needed someone? Luck? Coincidence? NO. I’ve been watching you since you were five fucking years old. Remember when you were six, what happened? Huh? That first time I protected you in the gym? Everything that makes me who I am was created to take care of you. To keep you safe and give you everything you deserve. You’re mine, Vic. Always have been.”

She teetered on the precipice. Cameron watched as her face showed the battle behind her eyes. She needed one more push, one more moment, and the door that he had shoved his foot into would open.

The creamy silk ivory of her skin looked almost translucent in the strange breaks of sunlight that streamed over her face. She fussed with her caramel colored waves, then pushed two tendrils behind her ears with quivering hands.

Her mouth opened, the words came soft, dripping with something that sounded like a child chastised for wanting something she did not deserve.

“No. I’m not yours Cameron. We can’t ever be more. Go back to Colorado. I don’t need this. I don’t need you. I know who you are, and I don’t need more of this life. I want
out
of here. Fighters, violence, pain, death…it’s not where
I
am going to stay, and this is
your life
. It’s everything you are. Even if we weren’t who we are,
family,
— whether you want to admit it or not — I would never choose you. You’re dangerous, I’ve
seen it.
More than once. It’s only a matter of time until it happens again, and next time, the stupid brotherhood or code or crazy luck you’ve had so far, may not be there to protect you and I am not signing up for misery.”

It was hard for anyone else to understand what it was like growing up in this world. Especially for a little girl, surrounded by it, living and breathing every day the stink of sweat and testosterone. The blank stares of men that had taken far too many blows to the head and never spent more than a moment wondering if there was anything else out there for them but pain.

Cameron was one of them. He was born fighting.

He came out of the womb still striped with his mother’s blood with a cry so fierce, the nurses and doctors pulled him from her body and whisked him away sure there was something terribly wrong.

He wailed and fought their every touch. When they found no signs or symptoms of malady, they did their best to wrap the tiny Tasmanian devil in a light blue bordered swaddling blanket and lay him in Kitty’s arms with a sympathetic smile.

His mother was the only one that was ever able to tame the animal that lived inside Cameron. Her magic touch kept him bound to a life for which he otherwise didn’t belong.

That is, until Victoria.

In the darkest days after Cameron watched the grim faces of family he never met before carry the glossy rose colored box and slide it into the back of the black hearse, he felt himself slipping away. If it hadn’t been for her, his tenuous connection to his own life would have slipped even farther from his grasp.

“You don’t need to sign up. You’re already miserable.” Cameron heard the words as he spoke, already wishing he could pull them back like a teasing punch.

“Fuck you Cameron. Fuck you and your
‘I need to protect you’.
I don’t need you. Go back to Colorado and do us all a favor before trouble finds you like it always does and pulls us all back on your crazytrain.”

Her eyes didn’t match her words.

The first gathering of tears started in the corner of her eyes, and Cameron felt the crush of a fist around his heart. He held back his violent need to shut her up with another kiss, to shove her into the wall and bury himself deep inside the beauty of what lay between her legs.

Before he took his next breath, both her hands gave him a ferocious shove. The physical impact was like that of a rose thrown against a cinderblock wall, before she spun like a tornado and ran into the light of the sidewalk and left him standing in the stink of the alley the feel of her lips like a ghost against his.

“I’m a big boy. I can wait. I’m not going anywhere.” Cameron wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or himself.

If she thought her words would push him away, that is not what happened. He felt the invisible threads that bound her to him pull ever tighter, choking him with a sense of possession, so passionate, a wave of unfamiliar fear knocked at his heart.

She knows. It’s just my purpose in life to bring her into the knowledge. She’s mine, she will always be mine, and nothing will ever change that.

8

Sixteen hours and zero sleep later, Victoria spread the slick, black and white images across the worn oak of her kitchen tabletop. Her fingers spun the lens, her sleepless brown eye pressed against the familiar portal through which she saw life.

Clicks that preserved moments in time even as the actors continued their play unaware of their immortal presence on the film.

She took pictures of pictures, layers of frozen moments of life, one on top of the other, captured again as a collage of time. Today, it was his face that covered her table. The crooked bend of his nose slightly to the left from Bobby Reynold’s left hook back when he was 16.

Growing up in this life, every day was filled with the tales and stories of strength, fury and unworldly power that made you a winner. Some men fought for a purpose — a cause. They fought with honor, forethought and control.

Not Cameron.

He fought because there was no other choice. Violence was his charge — his mantle. And without question, he carried it as a perfectly fitted yoke around his neck.

Her fingertips grazed over the shiny surface of a boy’s face, one eye visible, the other a mass of dripping crimson blood and gray shades of the brilliant purple bruises left by his far superior opponent.

Only, the boy in this picture did not understand that losing was an option.

The boy fought the man who outweighed him and outreached him by enough to make it far less than a fair fight to begin with, with a fury of vengeance.

With one eye and less than ten years’ experience compared to his opponent, Cameron worked his magic. Instinct combined with training, looping down under a forceful combination that threw the man off balance for just two seconds, giving Cameron his opportunity.

He mounted an assault that knocked them both onto the faded mats slick with sweat and drops of Cameron’s blood.

With the reflexes of a cat, Cameron had his legs locked around the man’s throat, both hands like a hydraulic vice pulling his opponents arm on its hinge. Opening it until his elbow balanced on the rock hard muscle of Cameron’s thigh.

It was a moment of choice. He was supposed to hold, give him those few seconds to tap — to surrender — and save his arm.

But, Cameron wasn’t there. It was that animal just below the surface fighting in that ominous moment. And, animals don’t wait. They don’t have sympathy, compassion or patience.

It was her first real camera. Victoria took it everywhere with her. She captured the gruesome glory of a fight, won or lost. She kept is close everyday at the gym, waiting for a moment to seize when a sparring match was becoming more.

Like that day.

It was just supposed to be a regular workout day. Larry had set them up for a sparring match. The man was new, Russian, older and needed a workout — he had tilted his head toward the boy and Larry had agreed. Cameron worked a bag in the corner, oblivious to the monster that had reappeared after all these years.

When Larry called for him, the monster was warmed up, back turned, waiting for the young sparring partner he was sure would be an easy mark. The boy that had assaulted him in that back hall years ago was about to be schooled. Or so he thought.

As soon as Cameron stepped through the ropes and focused, there was never a doubt how the fight would end.

It took a long moment before the ice ran through Victoria’s veins. The same faded red silk shorts and lion tattoo sent her on a train back in time until she felt the bile rise in her throat, her voice sucked away just as it was that day when she stood shivering the back hallways listening to the monster.

‘Don’t tell.’

Victoria remembered grabbing the camera, her long lens a birthday gift from Larry and Cameron just a few weeks before. She knew it would end badly, either Cameron would leave the ring on a stretcher, or the Russian monster would leave far worse off than when he came in.

As she clicked away, the enormous man connected with Cameron’s face, shutting his eye and opening a deep gash that flooded his face with slick red. No more than a minute passed before Cameron found his moment, and she saw for the first time the lethal fury that lived inside the boy.

She caught the moment when the tendons gave way with the snap of the camera. She heard the sickening crunch of the bones detaching from each other.

Like puzzle pieces pulled apart, the elbow joint resounded in a sickening “POP” even as Larry jumped the ropes and grabbed at the young animal as he finished off his opponent.

Victoria felt the same flood of nausea today as she let her fingers trace over the pictures.

Shit. What does he think we can do? Run away and play happily ever after? People like us don’t get happy endings.

The unspoken tension that had gnawed at her for years made real by his unwillingness to just let things go. Some things just can’t be changed, no matter how fierce your will to change them.

Only, men like Cameron didn’t know that, and he never would.

Come on. You’re going to be late.

The night before, the sound of his voice echoed in her mind.

The way he smelled as he pulled her against him, the flavor of his lips on hers made her belly flip. Lying in bed, unable to fight the tension he started deep in her core, her fingers grazed over her thigh, eyes closed, neck arched as she wiggled out of her baby blue boy shorts, the soft white sheets tented over her bent knees.

Even after a long, blazing hot shower, her body still flowed with desire as her fingers dipped inside her slick crevice. Soaking wet and throbbing as she crushed her fingers into her body, a vision of Cameron hovering over her, his manhood tickling at her entrance — his unwavering iridescent sky blue eyes, watching her face as he entered her, slowly and deliberately for the first time.

Victoria layered her hands into one, pressing down as hard as she could, every image in her mind conjured the hard lines and shadowed valleys of the inked torso she knew as well as her own.

Years of training and sacrifice turned his body into a shrine of stretched smooth skin over granite muscle, and her minds eye knew every inch.

Her breathing quickened, she let two slender fingers push upward into her soaking entrance, pulsing as his face haunted her. Victoria imagined the blue of his eyes as she felt him move onto her and into her, his hands wrapping around until she was frozen in his grasp, his hips moving with hers as they found a rhythm.

Her fantasy played on like a movie with Cameron burying his thick manhood deep inside. Victoria ground her palm onto her swollen nub.

A wild, almost painful moan escaped her lips as the first tingling tension drew up in the bottoms of her feet, she pressed down harder, hearing the sound of her hand slipping back and forth over her soaking folds.

“Oh God…” She whispered as the tension rushed up her legs, each cell in her body exploding at the same moment in a fury of shameful need as her orgasm engulfed her in waves and waves of peaceful and ferocious bliss.

She rocked her hips upward into her palm, dreaming she was taking him deeper and deeper into her body, willing him to find his own pinnacle and fill her with his own heated release.

Moans and whimpers dripped out of Victoria as the tangled white sheets wrapped around her ankles.

The smallish bedroom with cracked plaster walls felt like a Swedish sauna. When she’d arrived home hours ago, there was a chill that followed her. Desperate to find relief, she had flipped the thermostat up to just under eighty degrees.

Sweat covered her body as she finally drifted into a moment of rest.

She wouldn’t call it sleep, because that eluded her.

Hours passed unnoticed; the sun danced its first fingers of light across the deep crevices of the old wood floors, up the eyelet bedskirt and across her face.

Victoria lay with eyes wide open praying that Cameron made his way back west and left her in peaceful denial of what they both knew would never be.

She looked at the glossy photo, staring back was the face of the 16 year old boy that had snapped the giant Russian monster’s arm in half until the base of the humerus ripped through his flesh.

Victoria drew in a shallow breath and, like an infinite number of times before, wished beyond words that her mother was here to guide her.

No words of wisdom were to be found, not today or for as many days as she could count. With a knot in her belly and a deep anxiety clutching like a nylon rope around her heart, she made her way into the lime green and black tiled bathroom.

Victoria stared into the cracked mirror over the chipped white porcelain pedestal sink -- stained with years of rust from the perpetually dripping faucet, the eyes looking back at her stung with the deep regrets already stacked up in her short life.

With a hot shower to wash away the angst, Victoria gathered her canvas messenger bag, her ever present camera, and the black and white picture of Cameron as he stood in triumph over the fallen beast.

The strap carved a deep indent across the t-shirt emblem of the place from which she did not know how to escape her familial servitude. Another deep breath and the wind caught her hair as she made her way down Martin Ave.

Trash scurried from alleyways across the road, spinning in the whipping wind as a few cars made their way in roars and hums back and forth on the cracked cement of the street.

Victoria grabbed at her hair, cursing that she had not thrown it in to a ponytail before stepping out into the vortex that seemed to be following her. The wind flung tendrils across her face and into her eyes and mouth as she grabbed blindly at the metal handle of the gym door.

The gym was alive and moving like a biological organism when she arrived. Saturday’s were busy from 5:30 am until they closed at 2:30 am. Men liked to fight, especially on the weekends.

And fighting men didn’t seem to have anything else to do. If they were open 24 hours a day, there would be men here fighting, 24 hours a day.

Now, just to be fair, there were a few women that made their way to the bags and through the ropes now-a-days. Mostly they fought over at Tyson’s, it wasn’t quite so rugged as it was here at Southside. Roger and Larry had barely changed anything since she had started picking up towels when she was six.

There was a men’s locker room, complete with a wide open tiled expanse with eight shower heads and fifty lockers. Then, there was a ladies bathroom that had three lockers pushed into the back stall.

It wasn’t exactly a separate but equal kind of establishment.

There was a stink that never seem to fade, no matter how clean Victoria tried to keep the place. It was a combination of vinyl mats, bleach, sweat, and years and years of fighter’s funk that no cleaning solution seemed to combat fully.

It wasn’t entirely unpleasant, but it also wasn’t something you could bottle and sell. It was the smell of a fighting gym and it had become as much the smell of her home as the memory of her mother’s black strap molasses cookies.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Larry snorted. He met her with narrow, red rimmed eyes as soon as she rounded the corner and he saw her from his place at the edge of a sparing round he was coaching.

“Sorry.”

Fuck off is what I should say. Why am I the one always saying ‘Sorry’?

“Get in the back and enter the checks for deposit. First of the month. I wanna know how many of these fuckin’ losers owe me money. Anyone past two months due is out. I want a list, before lunch.” Larry pointed his cane up and toward the back of the gym.

The office was piled with decades of old news articles, files, and folders filled with something that must have once seemed important.

Victoria set her coffee down on her desk, the only spot within the cinderblock gray walls with any semblance of order. She flicked on her desk lamp, adjusted the one pen and one pencil next to her accounting calculator.

Her chair squeaked, and the wheels made a sound like they were rolling over sand as she adjusted herself, grabbing the thick vinyl envelope that contained a pitiful number of checks and cash. Her computer monitor blinked to life, but she knew it would be several minutes before her decade old desktop would be ready for her.

Her eyes followed the pictures framed along the walls. Some were her own snaps of significant fights or victorious triumphs. But, most were of Cameron, both Larry and Roger standing at his side, doing everything they knew to harness and focus the fighting savant.

What am I doing?

Victoria felt a thump begin deep down inside as she looked at the pictures. The years added layers of hard muscle to the younger face that looked out from the black and whites.

But, the eyes never changed. You would think eyes the color of robin’s eggs would make you smile, but not Cameron’s. They just made you uncomfortable; you couldn’t wait to look away, like something inside him wasn’t human.

Even in black and white, those eyes followed her, looking more than haunting as the younger version of the man that floated in and out of her dreams dappled the walls of the office.

Looking over toward her humming monitor, her fingers lit for a moment on the small framed picture to the left of her phone.